For the first time in two decades, our award-winning reporter returns to the
Bosnian city – and hears how the pain of a brutal conflict still remains.

Enisa Salcinovic is telling a story. It is one she has told many times before, but her hands are shaking and tears roll down her cheeks as if it happened yesterday. It is a story of war, of killings and rape, of hatred and despair; of the evil people can do to fellow human beings. It is a story of Bosnia.

This weekend, the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo is marking the 20th anniversary of the start of the 44-month siege that came to symbolise the most bloody conflict in Europe since the Second World War. It was sparked by the disintegration of what was Yugoslavia. By the time it ended in an uneasy truce in 1995, it had claimed an estimated 100,000 lives and left around 2.2 million people dispossessed.

Today, 17 years after the shelling and sniping stopped, the pain has continued for women like Enisa. “It doesn’t go away, however many times I tell my story,” she says, weeping in a café near her home in the Dobrinja district of Sarajevo. “Even now I find myself thinking, how could it have happened? How could such hatred, such violence have risen up to consume us all?”

In April 1992, Enisa, a hospital administrator, her electrician husband Nusret and their two young daughters were living in Foca, a river valley town in eastern Bosnia. One day, without warning, local Bosnian Serbs began rounding up thousands of Muslim and Croat civilians, as they were to do across the country. Much later, it would be given a name: “ethnic cleansing”.

Nusret was among those taken away. A few days later, Enisa was visited by one of his colleagues. The man, a Bosnian Serb, had not come to commiserate. Instead he raped her. He then told the terrified woman he would be back in a few days and warned her not to leave home or he would hunt her down and kill her.

Over the next few months, the man repeatedly raped her in the family home, often with her children and elderly parents in the next room. In August, Foca’s Muslims were told to leave.

Enisa never saw Nusret again. Later, she learnt he had been shot by his captors and his body dumped in the Drina river. “He was on a bus being moved somewhere. They stopped by a bridge and took off 24 men, one of them my husband. He knew he was going to die. He told a relative, 'Give my wife and my children a kiss from me,’” says Enisa, now 58. “The river rose, the river fell. We never found him.”

At the start of 1992, Sarajevo was a cosmopolitan, cultured and ethnically diverse city, home to around 400,000 people. In April that year, Bosnian Serb forces – led by Radovan Karadzic – took to the hills surrounding the capital and cut it off from the world for three times longer than the siege of Stalingrad.

From vantage points overlooking the city, the Bosnian Serbs attempted to pound Sarajevo into submission with mortars and shells. The average number of shells launched daily on the mainly civilian population was 329. On the worst day – July 22 1993– 3,777 fell.

Crowds foraging the almost-bare market stalls for food, or queuing at water standpipes, were easy targets. A football match was hit, killing 15; a water queue hit, killing 12; and at Markale marketplace in February 1994, a shell killed 68 civilians.

Snipers, who could pick off a child walking hand-in-hand with his grandfather at 500 metres – and did – terrorised the local population. Death came in many guises. The sub-zero winter temperatures took their toll on a weakened population without water, electricity and little, if any, food. Desperate Sarajevans cut down almost every tree in the city and dug up bushes to burn to stave off the cold. When there was no plant life left, they burnt their books and their furniture.

Hardly a family emerged from the war unscathed. In a small park by the main road running through Sarajevo, there is a memorial to the children who were killed. Name after name is engraved on seven turning cylinders: Aldin Sipovic 1992-1993; Mirza Parla 1983-1993; Damir Mekic 1988-1992… the list goes on. In the spring sunshine, an elderly woman approaches the monument, kisses her middle and index fingers and touches the cylinder. As she stands, head bowed, the sound of the water in the fountain seems to drown out the traffic.

In 1992, Marina Emersic, then 31, and her sister Mirna, 23, lived in a tower block just 100 yards from the front line. At the entrance to their estate in 1992 someone had written, “Welcome to hell”. That year, they invited me to stay with them, offering a mattress in the hallway. “It’s the safest place,” they assured me. The term “safest” was relative: the inside walls of the flat were peppered with holes where shrapnel from the shells crashing down outside had passed straight through, and sometimes out the other side of, the building.

Every day Marina braved what became known as “snipers’ alley” to reach her office in the accounts department at the Holiday Inn, home to visiting journalists. In the beginning everyone ran. Towards the end, weary and despairing at what had become a living death, Sarajevans would walk, leaving their fate to chance and the mood of the Bosnian Serbs that day.

“I try to think of happier times, the things we laughed about, and not the bad days,” says Marina, who still lives in the same flat and shared a lunch with me last week. “But even today when I see a table full of food, I thank God there is something to eat.”

It took her sister Mirna, who now lives in Germany, years to get over the trauma and guilt of seeing her father injured by a shell that fell just feet from the apartment, and being so paralysed with fear that she was unable to run for help. “I will never forget that. Never,” she says. “He was lying there bleeding and I could not move.”

During the siege, everyday items – soap, toothpaste, cosmetics – became luxuries. For Mirna, pizza and sweets were the stuff of dreams. During one visit, I brought Marina and Mirna some chocolate. Later, I discovered they had argued all the way home about whether to eat it en route or save it to share with family and neighbours. “But what if we are shot and killed on the way home? Then we will never have tasted the chocolate,” argued Mirna.

When the war ended in 1995, Bosnia was divided into three areas representing the country’s warring factions: the Bosniaks, the Croats and the Serbs. Today, representatives of all three have a say in running the country. Since they mostly disagree, the result is often paralysis.

Yet there is a glimmer of hope in the absence, on the surface at least, of outright hostility between the previously warring factions. Some complain of discrimination against the now-minority Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats, but no one I spoke to was anything other than conciliatory. There is anger and frustration – particularly at the rampant unemployment – and accusations of official corruption, but no hatred; at least none that is openly expressed. It is as if everyone is aware where hatred took them to 20 years ago.

Few of the Serbs who fled Sarajevo, crossing to the side of the besiegers, have returned, and for those like Maja Kraljavca, 34, who lost their homes, there has been little closure. In a shanty settlement in Lukavica, an area of what used to be known as Serb Sarajevo, Maja and her two children, Radomir, five, and Elena, 12, live in a tin-roofed former army barracks. Maja was 14 when the war broke out and her parents fled their home. The family, like around 100,000 others displaced by the war, has been waiting to be rehoused ever since.

“What kind of a life is this for my children? Before the war, when I was at school, we were all together – Serbs, Muslims, Croats – and nobody cared who was who. Now look what they have done. I am a Bosnian Serb, but I hate them for what they did. I have never had a normal adult life. That is all I want.”

In Sarajevo, the rare signs of reconciliation between the communities are hindered by high unemployment and poverty. There was widespread astonishment last week when soldiers from both sides, many of whom had been trying to kill each other 20 years ago, gathered in Sarajevo to complain about having their pensions cut. “It was nothing personal, even then, it was political,” said one Bosnian Serb, in army fatigues. “Now we are all poor and all in the same boat.”

On Friday, in a moving tribute, 11,541 empty chairs were laid out in the centre of Sarajevo to symbolise the dead and the missing. In the middle were row upon row of smaller chairs, some decorated with flowers, soft toys or messages, to commemorate the lost children.

For Enisa Salcinovic, her story and the story of Bosnia has to be told, and retold, no matter how painful. It is the only way to ensure the slaughter and suffering were not in vain.

“Even now I cannot understand how people we lived with all our lives, our neighbours, turned on us and wanted to make us disappear,” she says. “All we can do is educate our children to make sure they never have to go through what we did. But I still lie awake at night thinking, how did this happen? Where did this hatred come from?”